I tried with Mandrake back in the 90s. It was Ubuntu that really clicked for me though. Once I understood what "apt" was, it changed my world. It took all the difficulty out of administering my computer. Windows didn't really work all that well in those days. Apt changed everything. I could outsource my administration to the distro maintainers. Windows just became a toy. With Linux I could have pretty much anything the way I wanted, and I didn't have to do anything other than install a package.
BTW, It's perfectly possible to administer your system with just GUIs. It's just easier to use the command line once you're used to it. The Windows command line isn't very powerful, and has fallen to the wayside. But you can do really powerful things there that are difficult to represent or share visually from a *nix system. That tends to make it popular for helping others.